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The area that now encompasses Spink County was virgin prairie grassland 140 years ago, inhabited by Native American Sioux who survived by hunting the millions of roaming buffalo. The land was surveyed a few years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 in accordance with the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Homestead Act of 1862. Within 25 years, the land was completely covered with farms, ranches, and towns and connected to the rest of the United States by a grid of railroads. Thanks to the then new science of photography, the amazing transformation of vast, treeless, sparsely populated prairie into a completely settled agricultural community is recorded here in wonderful and fascinating detail. Spink County is the pictorial record of an amazing historical movement.

When water from the Sierra Nevada reached the San Francisco Bay area in 1934, it was greeted by a national celebration after two decades of grueling construction. The Hetch Hetchy Project evolved from a long search for a reliable source of water for San Francisco that began after the 1906 Great Earthquake. Prior to the earthquake, San Francisco had burned to the ground repeatedly due to the lack of water to fight fires. Studies of 14 different sources led to the design of an engineering marvel that conveys water using gravity across California via a complex system of tunnels, reservoirs, pipelines, powerhouses, treatment plants, and dams. But before the Hetch Hetchy Project broke ground, controversy roiled over the project. Finally, the Raker Act was passed by Congress in 1913 and signed by Pres. Woodrow Wilson to permit the use of the rights-of-way for the project. Today, this system serves some of the highest-quality water in the nation to 2.4 million people.